Alistair Lomas (University of Manchester). Revolution, salvation, seaweed: Toward an anthropology of hype
| Dates: | 29 September 2025 |
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| Times: | 15:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Alistair Lomas |
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While undertaking research into seaweed cultivation on the west coast of Scotland in 2022-23, I struggled to understand a gap between what was being written and spoken about seaweed farming in the media, industry reports and conferences, and what I was observing empirically in my fieldsite. According to the former, I was seeing the beginning of a ‘seaweed revolution’ that could save the world; the latter suggested a tiny industry that was fighting to become viable. What was this gap and how could it be explained? The answer, I realised, was hype.
This paper aims to train anthropological attention on hype by asking: what is it? What does it do? What gets hyped and why? By whom and for whom is it constructed, and upon what narratives is it based? Drawing on my ethnographic research into seaweed cultivation, reflections on other currently hyped industries such as AI, recent work in anthropology and cognate disciplines on futures and speculation, and a longer lineage of scholarship that links capitalism and the ‘occult’, I suggest that attention to hype and its narratives is vital for understanding and critiquing dominant capitalist imaginaries of the future in the present.
Alastair Lomas is a multimodal anthropologist with a recent PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media from the University of Manchester’s GCVA (06/2025). His work examines rural, coastal futures and human relations with the environment in the Anthropocene, with a focus on Scotland and Japan.
Speaker
Alistair Lomas
Organisation: University of Manchester
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Boardroom (2.016-17)
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
